SharePoint Conference Keynote Ramblings

So Microsoft made a big to-do over the Denali demo of HA failover, but it seemed more like a normal SQL clustering and a (finally) unified UI for administration of SQL replication methods. The bigger news I thought was the ability to have read-only active mirrors. But having failover in a cluster for a large data set, that’s kind of old news. Should have demo’d the ability to have active/semi-active farms, or being able to implement your SQL replication, HA and DR strategy in minutes rather than days.

Beyond that most of the Keynote was as expected, just patting the collective self on the back for SharePoint 2010 and Office 365 being popular solutions. If you were watching you also got to see some of the things I’ve built at eBay during the customer demo video mid-way through the keynote. It’s crazy how many people are picking up the SharePoint banner and extending the platform compared to just a few years ago. The environment has changed a lot since 2007 was first released and SharePoint became a real platform. Now some might argue that pre-2007 was ‘real’, but it wasn’t, 2007 was really the first version of SharePoint with a consistent vision and story for the platform that was extendable, sustainable and manageable. 2010 took the ball built with 2007 and ran with it bringing us to where we are today, and I cannot wait until 2014 gets demoed next year!